Since tourists don’t vote in places they don’t live, it’s customary for local governments to gouge visitors with excessive and arbitrary travel taxes and fees tacked on to hotel rooms, airport, railroad and interstate bus transactions, car rentals, etc.,
at venues like airports, lodgings, and so on,

where local voters are less apt to go. A particularly egregious example: taxi ride fares in Las Vegas, a sprawling western city where most locals drive their own cars and parking fees are minimal to non-existent to attract gamblers.

You’ll want to think twice before taking a Vegas cab. Turning on the
meter costs $3.50 — before you’ve traveled an inch. At the end of the
ride, a tip is added with no obvious way to remove or change it. If you
choose to use Visa/MasterCard or Amex, there’s a $3 fee to swipe the
card. A short trip — from the Venetian to Caesar’s, say, about a half
mile — can set you back $15.

Is that $3 swipe fee even legal? (In California, Colorado,
Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma
and Texas, at least, it would be against the law; what’s up, Nevada?)
Doesn’t charging the fee amount to offering a cash discount? Visa rules
don’t allow retailers to charge cardholders a checkout fee for using
their cards; probably neither do the agreements of other credit card
issuers. Even if, in tight times, a business felt it needed to make up
the sums paid to the credit card card companies, these amount to about
3% of the cost of a transaction not, as in the case at hand, a usurious
20%!

On your virtual travels, don’t fail to visit the site of New York-based photographer and fellow traveler Malcolm Kirk. Galleries on the site focus on Iconic Figures
— revealing studies of prominent figures in the arts and sciences, from
Marcel Duchamp and Saul Steinberg to Richard Feynman and Arthur C.
Clarke, including the famous portrait of Andy Warhol
that the iconic and ironic artist turned into a series of silk-screened
‘self-portraits’ that hang in major museums throughout the world; Man As Art
— a record of tribal body decoration in Papua New Guinea that was
published in a large-format hardcover book documenting islanders’
visually stunning tribal body decorations, headgear and carved masks; Silent Spaces — a documentation of aisled barns dating back to the 12th century; and Enclosed Gardens — a pictorial essay covering some of the world’s most magnificent
gardens, self-assigned projects that each involved years of research.

“Fallen Fruit
is a long-term art collaboration that began by mapping fruit trees
growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has
expanded to include serialized public projects and site-specific
installations and happenings in various cities around the world.

“By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue
of projects and works reimagine public interactions with the margins of
urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience.
Public Fruit Jams invites a broad public to transform homegrown or
public fruit and join in communal jam-making as experimentation in
personal narrative and sublime collaboration; Nocturnal Fruit Forages,
nighttime neighborhood fruit tours explores the boundaries of public and
private space at the edge of darkness; Public Fruit Meditations
renegotiates our relationship to ourselves through guided visualizations
and dynamic group participation.

“Fallen Fruit’s visual work includes an ongoing series of narrative
photographs, wallpapers, everyday objects and video works that explore
the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and
world around us. Recent curatorial projects reindex the social and
historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing
permanent collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as
subject matter.

“Theoretically, David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young are the three artists of Fallen Fruit that imagine fruit as a lens through which to see the world.” — from the website.

“In 1993 three Australians and one Englishman took their kayaks to two
rivers in what used to be called Soviet Central Asia. As far as we can
ascertain, it was the first time kayaks had been taken into Uzbekistan and Kirgizstan, and probably the first time kayaks had been taken down the Chatkal and Pskem rivers.”

Dancing with the Bear by Liam Guilar is a free online book that recounts their journey. It offers a reminder that not all roads have been taken, that there are still unique adventures to be had.

Not big cities that figure in thousands of books, like New York and London and their numerous incitements, but “houses and moors, caves and farmlands hidden away in authors’ hometowns or childhood vacation spots.” So she compiled a list of ten real life places that inspired the likes of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Emily Brontë, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Robert Frost and F.Scott Fitzgerald to create literary classics.

The Travel Film Archive sells commercial access to travelogues and educational and industrial travel films, “…from the boulevards of 1920′s Paris to the streets of San Francisco in the 60′s…from the Sudan to Palestine to Pakistan” and every place in between. All of the footage, much of it in color, was shot on film between 1900 and 1970. The library includes work by renowned travel filmmakers Burton Holmes, Andre de la Varre, and James A. FitzPatrick, as well as footage shot by journeyman cameramen. Although the films are not rentable by individuals, the catalog available on line is a joy to visit, especially for anyone nostalgic for locations and lifestyles lost to time. Here, to take one example, is New York City as it was a little more than a half century ago: